Motivational Quotes

Language

We invent the world through language. The world occurs through language.

- Pancoast, Mal

Best Quotes about Language

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.

William Butler Yeats

Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

Woolf, Virginia

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law. Because, in other words, the powerful don't play; they mean to keep that power, and those who are the powerless (you and me) better shape up --mimic ape suck --in the very image of the powerful, or the powerful will destroy you --you and our children.

Jordan, June

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

Orwell, George

Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.

Bogan, Louise

As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.

Will, George F.

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

Mathews, Harry

The genius of democracies is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

Joyce, James

10.

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

Wilde, Oscar

11.

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Barthes, Roland

12.

Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in a few words.

Aprocrypha

13.

When a language creates -- as it does -- a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past.

Ricks, Christopher

14.

Deeds, not words shall speak me.

John Fletcher

15.

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

Whitman, Walt

16.

I wonder what language truck drivers are using, now that everyone is using theirs?

Pfizer, Sydney

17.

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

Chandler, Raymond

18.

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato the Elder

19.

If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.

Rushdie, Salman

20.

I wish life was not so short, he thought. languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.

Tolkien, J. R.

21.

The word of man is the most durable of all material.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

22.

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

Calvino, Italo

23.

The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.

Hofstadter, Douglas

24.

Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides.

Rita Mae Brown

25.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.

Aeschylus

26.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

Walcott, Derek

27.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Charlemagne

28.

Do not accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.

Samuel Johnson

29.

All official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology.

Barthes, Roland

30.

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

31.

Words have a longer life than deeds.

Pindar

32.

There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?

Ehrenreich, Barbara

33.

The problems of society will also be the problems of the predominant language of that society. It is the carrier of its perceptions, its attitudes, and its goals, for through it, the speakers absorb entrenched attitudes. The guilt of English then must be recognized and appreciated before its continued use can be advocated.

Ndebele, Njabulo

34.

I understand a fury in your words, But not the words.

William Shakespeare

35.

A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.

Herman Melville

36.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

37.

Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.

Kraus, Karl

38.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

Bachelard, Gaston

39.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

Baudrillard, Jean

40.

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

Tillich, Paul

41.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

Chomsky, Noam

42.

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple.

Ammianus, Marcellinus

43.

Language is not only the vehicle of thought, it is a great and efficient instrument in thinking.

Davy, Sir Humphrey

44.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

Sir Winston Churchill

45.

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.

Abraham Lincoln

46.

Poetry is the language of feeling.

Winter, W.

47.

How many languages are there in the world? How about 5 billion! Each of us talks, listens, and thinks in his her own special language that has been shaped by our culture, experiences, profession, personality, mores and attitudes. The chances of us meeting someone else who talks the exact same language is pretty remote.

48.

We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

Washington, Booker T.

49.

Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say have double meaning.

Huessy, Rosenstock

50.

Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.